Doing Good and Avoiding Evil
Part I. Principles and Reasoning
by Lisa Newton

3. Moral Commitments and the Discipline of Ethics

Ordinarily we make no distinction between the notions of "morality" and "ethics," "moral
obligations" and "ethical duties," "moral codes" and "codes of ethics." But
in philosophy we may distinguish "morals" from "ethics," according to
the level of analysis intended. "Morality" governs conduct, tells us to
follow the rules, and calls our attention to the fundamental commitments
with which we order our lives. Morality tells us not to steal; one tempted
to steal is morally bound not to steal, and one who habitually succumbs
to that temptation is an immoral person. "Ethics" is primarily an academic
discipline; it has to do with forms of reasoning rather than conduct,
it reflects on, compares, and analyzes rules, and it traces the logical
connections between fundamental principles and the moral commitments that
guide us. Ethics derives the principle of respect for the property of
others from which we further derive the rule, that we should not take
the property of others without authorization; ethics describes the conditions
under which the principle fails to apply or can be overridden. We can
live moral lives without knowing ethics, but we cannot discuss the morality
of our lives, defend it, put it into historical context, without the intellectual
tools to do so. Ethics provides those tools.

Morality is a precondition for ethics, in two ways. First, morality,
as a shorthand way of referring to all our transactions with each other,
is the subject matter of ethics, just as our transactions with the physical
world form the subject matter of science. Second, ethics is an activity,
and any activity requires certain moral commitments of those who take
part in it. We cannot do anything well without moral commitments to excellence,
or anything for any length of time without the moral virtue of perseverence.
The doing of ethics also has moral commitments appropriate to it. These
commitments, to reason and to the moral point of view, can rightly be
demanded of any person who would take ethics seriously.

In any troubling case, we have first of all an obligation to think about
it, to examine all the options available to us. We must not simply act
on prejudice, or impulsively, just because we have the power to do so.
We call this obligation the commitment to reason. The commitment
to reason entails a willingness to subject one's moral judgments
to critical scrutiny oneself, and to submit them for public scrutiny by
others; further, to change those judgments, and modify the commitments
that led to them, if they turn out (upon reflection) not to be the best
available. This commitment rules out several approaches to moral decisionmaking,
including several versions of "intuitionism" (a refusal to engage in reasoning
about moral judgment at all, on grounds that apprehension of moral truth
is a simple perception, not open to critical analysis), and all varieties
of "dogmatism" (an insistence that all moral disagreements are resolved
by some preferred set of rules or doctrines; that inside that set there
is nothing that can be questioned, and that outside that set there is
nothing of any moral worth).

Second, we have an obligation to examine the options from an objective
standpoint, a standpoint that everyone could adopt, without partiality.
We want to take everyone who has a stake in the outcome ("stakeholders," we
will call them) into account. Since this consideration for other persons
is the foundation of morality, we call this perspective universality,
or as Kurt Baier called it in a book of that name, the moral point
of view. The commitment to the moral point of view entails
a willingness to give equal consideration to the rights, interests, and
choices of all parties to the situation in question. This commitment to
impartial judgment has one essential role in the study of ethics: once
we have decided that all persons are to count equally in the calculations,
that each is to count as one and as no more than one, we have the unit
we need to evaluate the expected benefit and harm to come from the choices
before us, to weigh the burdens placed and the rights honored. We also
know that if anyone's wants, needs, votes or choices are to be taken seriously
and weighed in the final balance, then everyone's wants etc. of that type
must be weighed in equally; that is, if anyone is to be accorded respect
and moral consideration, then all must be. We can derive most of the moral
imperatives that we will be using from this single commitment.

By way of example, the familiar "Golden Rule," that we ought to treat
others as we would have them treat us, is a fine preliminary statement
of those commitments. With regard to anything we plan to do that will
affect others, we ought not just to go ahead without reflection; we ought
to ask, how would we like it if someone did this to us? That consideration
is perfectly adequate as a satisfaction of the moral commitments that
precede ethics. In general it may be said, that if we will not agree
to submit our decisions to reason, and to attempt to see the situation
from the point of view of all who are caught up in it, ethics is impossible.